Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “Lily?” he said, following her.

  The unexpected sight of a large television and two plump club chairs momentarily fazed her. The room had been converted into a den, probably years ago by his parents, judging by the decor. She recovered quickly and, aware of his puzzled presence just behind her, headed for the apartment’s master bedroom. She kicked off her shoes and was unfastening her belt when he grabbed her arms and pulled her to him. When they separated, minutes later, she could barely find her breath. She pulled his T-shirt over his head. He began to unbutton her blouse. They were as hurried and clumsy as they had been two decades earlier, but this time it wasn’t desperate hormones and fear of parental discovery that urged them on but a richer stew of needs, equal parts lust and comfort-seeking and the longing to reconnect.

  And it was happening in the master bedroom of apartment 5F, of all places! Lily was vaguely aware of the unchanged room as Larry slowly removed her blouse, and she allowed herself to think that she and Larry hadn’t changed, either. That thought, which had horrified her for so long, she who was all about willed change and constant progress, now sent a thrill of lusty pleasure down her entire length, beginning at the back of her neck, where Larry had placed a hand that was now pulling her back to him.

  Esme Hollender answered the door wearing a voluminous floral caftan that could easily have accommodated two more of her.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” Esme said, though Rosemary had called ahead. Esme always seemed on social automatic pilot, randomly extracting jauntily delivered lines from a musty repertoire of polite greetings and sympathetic responses. “Won’t you come in?” She made a jerky sweeping gesture with one arm.

  Rosemary had never been inside the apartment at 700 Fifth Avenue but could immediately tell that, like Esme’s caftan, it was much too big for one person. The enormous entrance hall, invariably referred to as a gallery in real-estate ads, opened onto myriad rooms and hallways. It was hopelessly gloomy, and not just because, as Rosemary discovered as she followed Esme into the library, all the apartment’s drapes and shades were resolutely drawn against the lovely fall sunshine, blocking what would be a remarkable seventh-floor view of Central Park. An air of what could only be called disappointment suffused the apartment, as if all the French furniture and Oriental rugs and gilt-framed oil paintings somehow knew they weren’t quite up to the task of doing justice to the vast space in which they’d been assembled. Esme herself looked small and unimportant in her own apartment, swallowed up in the plush upholstery of the sofa she’d collapsed into. Rosemary sat sideways to her in an armchair.

  “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” Esme asked.

  “As I mentioned on the phone…” Esme looked puzzled and then a touch annoyed. “I wanted to have a look at your full collection of Gallé. It might help us come up with an auction estimate for the vase you gave us.”

  “Would you like a drink? I think I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.”

  She managed to extricate herself from the sofa and crossed the room to a small table crowded with bottles and glasses. She held several glasses up to the dim overhead light before finding a clean one, and filled it halfway with gin.

  “What did you say you wanted, dear?”

  “Nothing for me,” Rosemary answered.

  “It’s cocktail hour somewhere in the world!” she said, inevitably, as she fell back into the engulfing upholstery with a relieved sigh. She took a deep swallow of gin.

  “We have a few pieces right here in the library,” Esme said. “There are more in storage.” Peering through the gloom, Rosemary made out a few vases on the bookshelves. She stood and crossed the room.

  “When do you think you’ll be auctioning that piece I gave you?” Esme asked as Rosemary picked up an aqua-blue iridescent vase. She blew off a veneer of dust.

  “Our next auction is in four months. Do you mind if I open a shade? I’d like to look at this in natural light.”

  “Not at all. I used to keep them open, you know, but then I had to let my girl go and it got to be too much trouble opening and closing them myself.”

  “You never replaced your housekeeper?” Rosemary said, blinking at the sudden infusion of light from the raised shade.

  “Well, it seemed easier just to handle the cleaning and whatnot on my own,” she said. To Rosemary’s skeptical squint she added: “If you do a little every day, it doesn’t get ahead of you.”

  This seemed a dubious claim, given the size of the apartment and the obvious neglect of the library. Beyond the filthy window, Central Park lay before her like a peaceful and orderly Breugal canvas. She raised the other shade.

  “My, what a lovely day,” Esme said doubtfully, turning away from the onslaught of sunshine.

  The vase was a fake. The seams were crudely joined, and the frosted glass, when held up to the light, revealed a faint crazing that never occurred in genuine pieces from the late nineteenth century. She replaced the vase and examined a few more pieces by daylight—a Lalique atomizer, another “Gallé” vase, a Daum bowl. Fakes, all of them, casting the authenticity of the original vase in serious doubt.

  “Alden loved his glass,” Esme said wistfully. “I never saw the point of it exactly, but chacun à son goût, I always say. Well, he always said.”

  “Do you have sales receipts for these items?”

  “I used to, but I don’t think I kept them. Alden was diligent about giving me invoices. I paid all the household bills during our marriage, you know, just to keep a lid on expenses. He didn’t understand money a bit. These vases and perfume jars and lamps cost a fortune, you know. I never could get used to the amounts on those invoices. Shocking, really. Alden hated being kept on an allowance, but it had to be, and I always let him have his way with the glass. It was an investment, he always said. Like money in the bank. How much do you think I could get for the entire collection?”

  “Do you recall the name of the dealer?”

  She took a deep, contemplative swallow of gin.

  “Harold something or other, I can’t remember, but it was always the same one, a dealer in Manhattan. I met him a few times, here in the apartment. I don’t think he had a proper gallery. A nicely dressed, good-looking fellow.” She leaned toward Rosemary and lowered her voice. “A bit swishy, I always thought. The art world, you know.”

  Rosemary conjured up two alternative scenarios. In the first, Alden, utterly lacking in gôut, was conned out of a great deal of money by an unscrupulous dealer in fakes. In the other, he and the swishy dealer used patently fake art glass to con Esme out of a great deal of money, getting her to fork over, say, five thousand dollars for a small vase that had been purchased—or perhaps even commissioned—for a few hundred, and then keeping the rest. A simple but clever way for Alden to supplement a stingy allowance.

  “Alden bought the paintings, too, you know. He had a connoisseur’s eye, he really did. He always said, ‘Ezra’—he called me Ezra—‘it’s wiser to spend a lot of money on something first rate than a little money on something second rate.’” She swirled her ice cubes. “Everything had to be first rate for him,” she said a bit sadly.

  “The art dealer, was it the same man who sold you the glass?”

  “You really are very clever. In fact, he even found us most of the furniture. French, all of it. Do you think Atherton’s would be interested? I’d hate to part with any of it, but there’s so much to dust, one less commode would hardly be missed!”

  “You need to find the dealer’s name. Check all your records.”

  “Sometimes I paid cash,” she said very softly.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Henry or Herbert or whatever his name was didn’t charge me sales tax if I paid cash. Do you know what sales tax is on a five-thousand-dollar…what do you call those tiny vases?”

  “Flacons.”

  “Flacons!” she said, shaking a tiny fist in the air, as if the very Frenchness of the object justified her entire folly. “I saved a fortune paying cash an
d I won’t apologize.”

  “Still, you should check every drawer in the apartment for his name.”

  “Will that help the auction?”

  “It will help establish the provenance,” Rosemary said. Even fakes have a provenance.

  On the way out, Esme detoured into the dining room. Running the length of the room was a three-pedestaled Chippendale table (Chippendale-style, more likely) on which a small aircraft could have landed. A phalanx of shield-backed chairs, uniformly spaced along either side, called attention to the pointlessly huge room, adding an aura of sad expectancy to the penumbral gloom. It felt less like a private dining room than the boardroom of a long-depleted charitable foundation. Esme stopped before a full-length portrait at one end of the room.

  “It’s by Paulus von Reiter,” she said, looking reverently upward. “Alden bought it on a buying trip to Europe.”

  “With his dealer, Howard or Harold?”

  “It’s very important to have expert advice. You’d be surprised at the number of unscrupulous characters in the art world.”

  The portrait showed a tall, portly man dressed in fancy eighteenth-century garb. It was the sort of safe, goes-with-anything picture prized by decorators. At Atherton’s they were dismissed as “Great-Great-Uncle Leopold Portraits,” invariably bought in quantity by the newly-rich for the walls of their newly acquired homes, and even when signed by a recognized artist, they were consigned to the basement showroom rather than the auction block.

  “You can see the signature, right there. Paulus von Reiter. Alden said there were several Von Reiters in the Metropolitan Museum.” She gestured toward the window, beyond whose drawn shade lay that very institution. “I suppose I could let you have it—auction it, I mean.” She smiled shyly. “I don’t eat in here much anymore. In fact I haven’t…” She slowly glanced rather sad-faced around the room, as if searching for crumbs, a discarded napkin, some evidence of a recent meal. “When the children visit we eat in the breakfast room, although they don’t usually stay for meals. Everyone is so busy these days.”

  “Atherton’s hasn’t had much success with”—she squinted at the signature—“with Von Reiter.” Rosemary moved away from the portrait and toward the foyer.

  “Oh, I see,” Esme said, frowning at the portrait, as if the “gentleman,” as all unknown male subjects were known, had let her down in a wholly unexpected but quite serious way, perhaps in erotic cahoots with Alden. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well, it does look genuine,” Rosemary said with as much enthusiasm as possible, neglecting to add that no one would bother forging a painting by an artist who might fetch at most five thousand dollars in a strong market. “I have to be going. My sitter expires in ten minutes.”

  “Oh, I see,” Esme said, finally turning away from the gentleman. “When will you decide on the reserve for the Gallé?”

  “I have to talk to Lloyd,” she said. “He’ll probably want to speak with you directly.” Want was not the word Lloyd would use, for it would be unwelcome news he’d be delivering. Alden Hollender and his “dealer” had taken her for a lot of money and, judging from the state her apartment, and Esme’s eagerness to unload even her treasured “gentleman,” it appeared she hadn’t had a lot to spare.

  “Please tell Lloyd to call soon,” she said. “I need…” Standing in the center of the vast foyer, she turned slowly around on tiny, unsteady feet. As each new room came into view, she appeared freshly panicked, as if she sensed long-standing enemies closing in from every direction. “I need to settle things quickly.”

  “I’ll talk to him this afternoon.” Rosemary managed to arrive at the front door before Esme had a chance to point out any other treasures with which she was willing to part, and left after an economical but polite good-bye.

  From Lily’s point of view, it seemed fitting, somehow, to be reviewing photocopies of checks Barnett had written on the firm’s account while she lay in Larry Adler’s bed. It had been the writing of the checks, after all, dozens of them, that had set off a chain of events that had led her to her current position—spoons, they had called it back in high school, Larry’s long body nestling perfectly into her back, as if their bones and muscles had retained memories of each other’s anatomies.

  “I think I’m offended,” he said. “You’re lying here with me, following the best sex I’ve had in a long, long time, and you’re working to exonerate your husband, a man who deserted you and your children. To hell with your husband.”

  “It’s about getting back everything the government took from us.”

  “Do you need it?”

  “I’m living on a pullout sofa in my parents’ apartment.”

  “You’ve found alternative accommodations.” He kissed the nape of her neck.

  “Great, I’ll go get the kids and we’ll move in tonight.”

  “No problem.”

  She sighed. “It’s not that easy. Nothing’s that easy. That was…”

  “That was what?”

  That was always the problem. Larry saw life as a set of circumstances to be accepted. She saw life as a set of obstacles to be overcome. She couldn’t decide what to say, and then she became distracted by one of the photocopied checks.

  “I need my purse,” she said, getting out of the bed. She found it in the foyer and rejoined Larry on the bed. She took out her date book and flipped through it.

  “I was right,” she said. “This last check, the last one he wrote?” She handed it to him.

  “Forty-three thousand dollars. Some check.”

  “The date it was written? Barnett and I were in Barbados. I remember because the trip was supposed to be for our anniversary, but something came up at the office and we had to delay it a week. This check was written the second day we were away. He wouldn’t have written a check while we were in Barbados, he couldn’t have deposited it.”

  Larry began running his hands lightly over her shoulders and back, nuzzling the nape of her neck. Lily flipped through the other check photocopies.

  “This one…” She turned the pages in her date book. “I’m pretty sure this date was the Friday after Thanksgiving last year. We were in Palm Beach for Thanksgiving.”

  “How quaint.”

  “Why would he wait until we were in Florida to write a check? Look, the checks were all deposited in New York banks.” She showed him the photocopies of the backs of the checks. According to the Feds, the checks had been deposited in several New York banks, and once they’d cleared a day or two later, the funds had been transferred to offshore accounts.

  “And this one…” She waved a photocopy at him. “We were on the Prestons’ boat in the Adriatic when this one was written. A boat! Who writes checks on a boat in the middle of the Adriatic?”

  “Certainly not me.”

  She frowned. “You don’t understand, this is big. This means…” What exactly did it mean? Well, that Barnett really was innocent. Innocent of embezzlement, at least. He was still guilty of being a total shit. “Someone waited until Barnett was away to write these checks.”

  “But what difference would it make to a thief if he was away? You can write a check anywhere.”

  “I need to find out who had access to the account.”

  “And I have one important question,” Larry said.

  “What?”

  “Why is it that after twenty years apart, during our few intimate moments together, you and I are discussing your husband?”

  “We’re not discussing my husband. We’re discussing my future.”

  “It was always about the future with you, even back then. Don’t you ever stop to—”

  “Smell the roses?”

  “Go to hell.” He swung his feet over the edge of the bed. To a surprising extent they were right back where they’d left off more than twenty years ago, which had felt wonderful twenty minutes ago and now seemed sad and hopeless.

  “I didn’t mean to sound like that.”

  Sitting on the edge of the
bed, with his back to her, he said, “I can’t believe you want your old life back.”

  “I have two children to support. You don’t understand what it’s like to be responsible for other people.”

  “I don’t believe it’s just about the kids.”

  “It’s also about proving something to myself. I created my life, every aspect of it. I refuse to lose control now.” She joined him on the side of the bed.

  “Where were we?” she said.

  He seemed about to say something, and it wasn’t going to be an answer to her question, so she kissed him and pushed him back onto the bed.

  Twenty-six

  Peggy spotted her the moment she left the elevator at 218 West End Avenue, the pretty young mother pushing the double stroller across the lobby. It was a drearily common sight these days, a beleaguered parent behind an enormous plow of a stroller. They had taken over the West Side, monopolizing store aisles and sidewalks and elevators, often with a leashed dog in tow, as if two children in a stroller freighted with giant packages of disposable diapers wasn’t burden enough. Peggy always felt vaguely obsolete as she angled around these sidewalk flotillas, having shrunk a good inch and a half in height while all around her was evidence of growth, younger people taking on kids, pets, and unfathomable new products to tend to them, as if to fill the gap left by her retreating presence.

  She hadn’t intended to speak to the woman, but as they converged mid-lobby, she felt overcome by the need to make contact—not so much with the woman herself as with her old life, the one she’d left behind at 218 West End Avenue.

  “Are you enjoying the apartment?” she said. The woman looked puzzled. “I’m Peggy Gimmel.”